ABSTRACT
An ad hoc committee of interdisciplinary studies met during a NATO workshop on Coastal Oceanography convened by Professor H.G.Gade at Os, near Bergen in Norway, between 6th and 11th June, 1982. Amongst suggestions discussed by the committee was the preparation of a review of selected interdisciplinary studies in oceanography, with the aim of providing pointers to future work. What follows began as an attempt at such a review. It was not intended to be exhaustive either of themes or references. In the final version we decided to concentrate on only two topics, which are indeed closely inter-related, and to illustrate these sparingly with references to work that seems to us to have involved fruitful collaboration between the disciplines of physical, chemical, and biological oceanography. A loosely ontological approach has been adopted not only as a structuring device but because we believe in using historical development as a pointer to topics that might hereafter prove fruitful. According to this, scientific development results from a combination of stochastic and deterministic processes: cf. Equation (12) (p. 114).
